A way to get Housing at the cost of Amenities

[Caprikel]

As things currently are, housing is basically a limited resource that can only be gained from certain buildings, and can only become plentiful once neighborhoods come into play.
My idea is that there should be a building project that adds more housing in the city center that not only costs a sizable amount of production, but also reduces amenities in the city. It only makes sense that having crowded housing in the middle of your city would make people more unhappy.
From a gameplay perspective, this would allow you to turn your excess amenities into housing, which would buff amenities (Which currently feel so easy to get plenty of) and effectively allow you to get as much housing as you want at a cost.
This would of course be meant to be a source of housing that you would only want to go after when you've used up your other potential housing sources, and would basically be a last resort.
A great thing about this would be that you could finally make high population cities in places where you don't have room for neighborhoods, and would mean you can make megacities for the fun of it without needing neighborhoods on every tile.
It might also be a good idea to buff neighborhoods along with this, since neighborhoods are generally not used very often anyway, so it would be nice if there was an incentive to have maybe a couple neighborhoods in each of your cities.

 

[Sostratus]

Hello secret Minnesotan!

If this is a project then in keeping with other projects, the effects would only be active while the project is ongoing. That is to say, the city couldn't do anything else and it would lose the extra housing when it stopped.
I take your meaning of "convert" to be a more permanent effect, which could be achieved via policy card or city center building (Generally C buildings don't have downsides, though.) or a neighborhood district building.

Now, as for neighborhoods generally, they provide a ton of housing for the most part; and they visually demonstrate the growth of your city, which i like as a concept. I do think extending the Mbanza Kongo's gold yield to them wouldn't be a bad move - essentially have neighborhoods grant gold per unit housing they provide. Even with good space it's not easy to go over 30 housing.

Side note:
With the removal of a true "unemployed citizen"" specialist and them now just providing a little gold, afaik, there's a hard limit on useful city size. (Ah, the days of vanilla civ5 unemployment spam+SoL with India...)
A city has 36 workable tiles in its radius, there are 5 districts offering up to 3 specialists each; so that would be +10 extra jobs (since a specialty district eats up a workable tile, swapping the improvement worker for 1 specialist) thus landing us at 46 jobs total. Less 1 per neighborhood you need. I know that Indonesia can do this with kampungs because they are ridiculous. If you stack the Housing engineers and seasteads or stepwells, you can probably do it that way too.
We notice that since specialty districts have the best job density (3 vs 1,) it is therefore advantageous to have as many of them as possible, leading to the dense blanket of cities as the best way to fit the most citizens in a given space, instead of having fewer larger cities. I don't think the devs really envisioned much beyond 25 as a thing for civ6 gameplay.

 

[Caprikel]

@Sostratus
Basically I would want it to function like a city center building that you can have multiple of, and it basically is adding more housing to the city center (Maybe it could have a visual representation with more city sprawl, although that probably wouldn't work in Civ 6).
From a realism standpoint it's quite odd there isn't a way to add more housing in a city, especially when most of the buildings there are places where people live.
Also I find it really strange how settling a 1 pop city in the later eras already has skyscrapers despite representing the same population as would be in a 1 pop city in the ancient era. Skyscrapers should only be in a city with a large population, which could also be tied in with this housing construction which could have a visual representation of the buildings becoming taller and/or more numerous.
Also for specialists, they would really need to be buffed to make there a point to even having very high population cities. They really should generate gpp just as they did in Civ 5, so that there will actually be a choice between working a high yield tile, or a specialist that will help you get a great person.
If this creates too many gpp in the game, there could be more great people to balance things out, or great people could require more gpp to acquire.

 

[Ciarson]

as i read your posts, i got a vision of what you may think.

your idea is to make " city project" that does the parallel to the policy card "insulae" "medina quarter" and "new deal".

those card give bonuses to the expense of a policy card slot.

In that sense, when those card became obsolete, it would be because the related "city project" is now available to be built in the cities fitting the requirement but at the expense of amenities (or gold, or both)

Therefore, when a the "insulae" card became obsolete, all cities that have 2 district can now build the "insulae project".

You would still be able to stack it with the "medina" policy card if the city got 3 district.

that way, if some of your cities were dependant of that policy card to maintain their size, losing that policy card would cause some set back that could be worked around with the project even if the project itself bring other problem and is city specific.

 

[Caprikel]

@Ciarson
Personally I'm not a fan of policy cards or other temporary boosts to housing. It defies all logic for a Civilization to build up housing with a new policy only for it to disappear when the policy is no longer in place.
They would however be much more tolerable if, as you stated, they can be made permanent with the city project that gives the same effect but with an amenity penalty. That way the policy is more so a way to add more housing but without the amenity penalty that would normally be present.